Thursday, September 29, 2011

My colleague David Osimo asked me, an assistant professor of eGovernance Systems in Aegean University, in Samos, to moderate an on-line discussion on Digital Agenda 2020 issues around Interoperability, Cloud and eID. This on-line group of experts and citizens will produce a report on findings and actions proposed, including on-line contributions.

When I accepted the task, the first suggestion was to list a few sources of relevant background material and gather some existing on-line discussion forums.

Monday, September 19, 2011

A meeting of a Greek and Ukrainan delegation on research and development projects and initiatives was held on 9th September 2011, at NTUA premises in Athens. Several Ukrainian State University and the Ukrainian Academy of Science were represented in this high-level meeting.

Projects presented in detail include:

- The PADGETS FP7 project on social-media based policy making

- The ENGAGE eInfrastructures project on Open Data

- The Greek National Interoperability Framework and the initiatives of the Greek Interoperability Centre

The two delegations agreed to proceed in strengthening the scientific collaboration between Greece and Ukraine in the areas of ICT, electronic Government and Interoperability.

European Research on Electronic Citizen Participation and Engagement in Public Policy Making

GuestEditors

Euripidis Loukis

Assistant Professor

University of the Aegean

Greece

email: eloukis@aegean.gr

Yannis Charalabidis

Assistant Professor

University of the Aegean

Greece

email: yannisx@aegean.gr

Jeremy Millard

Senior Consultant

Danish Technological Institute

Denmark

email: jrm@teknologisk.dk

Aims and Scope

The rapid development and the growing penetration of digital technologies provide rich opportunities for more extensive participation and engagement of citizens in public policy and decision making and in general for increasing the influence of society on government. They offer possibilities for strengthening political deliberation and establishing new participatory models of governance through electronic means which reduce existing limitations associated with time, location, cost and physical presence.

Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) have the potential to support the provision of information concerning government activities, decisions and public policies, and also to increase both the quantity and quality of consultation with the citizens. Also, ICT has the potential to support both top-down government initiatives and ground-up civil society ones, both aiming at enhancing public participation in the decision processes and improving interaction between society and government. ICT enable the collection of huge amounts of citizens’ knowledge on the problems and needs that public policies attempt to address, and on proposed courses of government action and legislation. At the same time ICT also enable the exploitation of this knowledge for the assessment of the impact of various policy options on society, so that governments can make better and more informed decisions.

However, it is necessary investigate to what extent this potential is actually exploited, what is the impact of the existing exploitation, and which contextual factors affect positively or negatively this impact. Furthermore, it is important to discover new ways of exploiting this huge potential and using ICT for increasing citizens’ participation and engagement in public policy making, and to proceed to pilot applications of them in ‘real-life’ cases and conditions in order to assess their value, and if necessary improve and optimize them.

Especially in Europe, due to its long tradition of social state characterized by strong interaction with the society and intervention in order to secure social welfare and support of weak groups (European Social Model), there is a strong interest in the above ideas. For this reason in the last ten years there has been extensive financial support by several institutions, such as the European Commission and the National and Local Governments, of research in this domain of ICT-supported/mediated citizen participation and engagement in public policy making for investigating the above research questions. It is quite interesting to reflect on the results and conclusions of this research, and attempt to exploit them both in Europe and in other parts of the world, probably with adaptations to local histories and political traditions.

This Special Issue of ‘Information Systems Management’ solicits original high quality papers presenting this ‘European Research on Electronic Citizen Participation and Engagement in Public Policy Making’. Topics of interest in this area include, but are not limited to:

•Innovative forms of ICT use for supporting and enhancing citizens’ participation

•Advanced systems for structured high quality deliberation

•Social media platforms and their applications for supporting citizens’ participation

•Textual analysis technologies, ontologies and taxonomies

•Opinion mining and sentiment analysis

•Data and argument visualization technologies

•Federated content syndication systems for public participation

•Trend monitoring and policy analysis

•Policy modeling and impact assessment

•Data-powered collective intelligence and action

•Studying the impact and the overall value proposition of e-Participation

•Methods for the evaluation of e-Participation

•Serious Games, simulation and virtual worlds for supporting policy making

At the end of each paper should be placed short biographical notes for all the authors, and also address for correspondence and e-mail address for the corresponding author.

Papers should be written in grammatically correct and coherent English. Submitted papers should not have been previously published nor be currently under consideration for publication elsewhere. All papers will be refereed through a peer review process. All submissions must provide:

- an abstract (max of 75 words)

- at least 3 keywords

- full author names and affiliations

- brief author bios

- an email address for the corresponding author

Prospective authors are welcome to submit an abstract to the Guest Editors for preliminary feedback on the appropriateness of their planned manuscript.

Hosted in the main Conference Hall (Aula Building) of the spacious TU Delft campus, the conference attracted almost 200 participants from academia, policy and industry. Main topics of the discussions for more than three days have been Open Data, Policy Modelling, Social Media applications in governance, electronic participation and more theoretical stuff in evaluation and assessment of e-governance status.

With Nitesh Barosa, at TU Delft - TPM Buildings

We had the chance to host the first Workshop on Open Data, opening the programme on Monday morning 09:00, with 30 participants. A few hours after, I had the chance to visit the Technology - Policy - Management Group, whereour collaborating team from TU Delft is based, including Marijn Janssen, Nitesh Barosa, Anne-Fleur van Veenstra and more.

Visiting TU Delft even so early in the semester was a nice inspiration - seeing how students work and relax in a nice surrounding. The town has also been a nice pair to the conference site: easy, small enough to walk all over, full of bicycles and low buildings.